The Supreme Court has dismissed an appeal by Danas Kairys against his surrender to Lithuania, ruling that Ireland’s failure to implement an EU framework for transferring prison sentences did not give him a legal basis to resist a European Arrest Warrant.
Lithuania seeks Mr Kairys’s surrender to serve the remaining balance of a combined three-year-and-seven-month sentence imposed in June 2015 for 13 offences. The warrant was endorsed by the High Court in June 2016. Mr Kairys was arrested and brought before the court in March 2021, and his objections to surrender were rejected by the High Court in a 2022 decision.
He argued that Ireland’s failure to implement the 2008 EU Framework Decision denied him at least the right to apply to serve his sentence here. He said he had formed a family unit with his partner and two young children in Ireland and that serving his sentence here would better support his rehabilitation. The State accepted that Ireland had failed to transpose the framework, but argued that this did not affect the obligation to surrender him.
In a judgment delivered on 22 December 2022, Ms Justice Baker said the framework decision was intended to create rights for sentenced people, but was not directly effective in Irish law. It did not itself give Mr Kairys an enforceable right to serve his sentence in Ireland, or create a ground for refusing surrender. The 2008 rules would provide a process to apply for a transfer once implemented; they would not guarantee that an application would succeed.
The Court noted that the EU Court of Justice had already found Ireland in breach of its obligation to implement the framework decision. But it held that refusal of surrender on that basis would add a ground outside the European Arrest Warrant system’s limited grounds for non-execution and could risk the sentence not being enforced. Ireland had not undertaken to enforce Mr Kairys’s sentence here.
The Court also rejected his arguments that surrender would breach his right to dignity or defeat a legitimate expectation. Justice Baker said the connection between those claims and the failure to implement the framework was too remote. A separate challenge based on his family life had been rejected by the High Court and was not the issue decided on this appeal.
The judgment criticised the State’s continuing failure to implement the EU rules and noted that serving the sentence in Ireland could have made family visits easier and less burdensome. It said the failure might be relevant to an exceptional Article 8 human-rights case on different facts, but those circumstances had not been established or argued here. The appeal was dismissed.